David Eyers

Thomas Pasquier, David Eyers, Jean Bacon

The Internet of Things promises a connected environment reacting to and addressing our every need, but based on the assumption that all of our movements and words can be recorded and analysed to achieve this end. Ubiquitous surveillance is also a precondition for most dystopian societies, both real and fictional. How our personal data is processed and consumed in an ever more connected world must imperatively be made transparent, and more effective technical solutions than those currently on offer, to manage personal data must urgently be investigated.

Thomas Pasquier, Xueyuan Han, Thomas Moyer et al.

Identifying the root cause and impact of a system intrusion remains a foundational challenge in computer security. Digital provenance provides a detailed history of the flow of information within a computing system, connecting suspicious events to their root causes. Although existing provenance-based auditing techniques provide value in forensic analysis, they assume that such analysis takes place only retrospectively. Such post-hoc analysis is insufficient for realtime security applications, moreover, even for forensic tasks, prior provenance collection systems exhibited poor performance and scalability, jeopardizing the timeliness of query responses. We present CamQuery, which provides inline, realtime provenance analysis, making it suitable for implementing security applications. CamQuery is a Linux Security Module that offers support for both userspace and in-kernel execution of analysis applications. We demonstrate the applicability of CamQuery to a variety of runtime security applications including data loss prevention, intrusion detection, and regulatory compliance. In evaluation, we demonstrate that CamQuery reduces the latency of realtime query mechanisms, while imposing minimal overheads on system execution. CamQuery thus enables the further deployment of provenance-based technologies to address central challenges in computer security.

Thomas F. J. -M. Pasquier, Jatinder Singh, David Eyers et al.

A model of cloud services is emerging whereby a few trusted providers manage the underlying hardware and communications whereas many companies build on this infrastructure to offer higher level, cloud-hosted PaaS services and/or SaaS applications. From the start, strong isolation between cloud tenants was seen to be of paramount importance, provided first by virtual machines (VM) and later by containers, which share the operating system (OS) kernel. Increasingly it is the case that applications also require facilities to effect isolation and protection of data managed by those applications. They also require flexible data sharing with other applications, often across the traditional cloud-isolation boundaries; for example, when government provides many related services for its citizens on a common platform. Similar considerations apply to the end-users of applications. But in particular, the incorporation of cloud services within `Internet of Things' architectures is driving the requirements for both protection and cross-application data sharing. These concerns relate to the management of data. Traditional access control is application and principal/role specific, applied at policy enforcement points, after which there is no subsequent control over where data flows; a crucial issue once data has left its owner's control by cloud-hosted applications and within cloud-services. Information Flow Control (IFC), in addition, offers system-wide, end-to-end, flow control based on the properties of the data. We discuss the potential of cloud-deployed IFC for enforcing owners' dataflow policy with regard to protection and sharing, as well as safeguarding against malicious or buggy software. In addition, the audit log associated with IFC provides transparency, giving configurable system-wide visibility over data flows. [...]